this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/30198502

System:

Debian 13 KDE (actually MX Linux, but doesn't seem to matter)  
Wayland (xwayland installed as well)  
Docker 29.5.2

Dockerfile:

FROM debian:trixie

ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
ENV LANG=en_US.UTF-8
ENV LANGUAGE=en_US:en
ENV LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

# Set locale
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
        locales && \
    apt-get clean && \
    sed -i '/en_US.UTF-8/s/^# //g' /etc/locale.gen && \
    locale-gen

# Install Wayland-specific packages
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
        dbus \
        libwayland-client0 \
        libwayland-egl1 && \
    apt-get clean

# Install X-specific packages
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
        dbus-x11 && \
    apt-get clean

# Add contrib, default is only main
RUN sed -i 's/^Components:.*/Components: main contrib/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources

# Add 32-bit arch for Steam libraries
RUN dpkg --add-architecture i386

# Install Steam
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
        steam-installer \
        pciutils && \
    apt-get clean

# Additional
# TODO: What is really needed?
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
        vulkan-tools \
        mesa-utils \
        x11-xserver-utils \
        libvulkan1 \
        mesa-vulkan-drivers && \
    apt-get clean

# TODO: Does `-storebeta` even work?
# https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Command_line_options_(Steam)
CMD ["/usr/games/steam", "-storebeta"]

To run the container:

xhost +
sudo docker run -it --name steam \
    -e XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR \
    -e WAYLAND_DISPLAY=$WAYLAND_DISPLAY \
    -v $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/$WAYLAND_DISPLAY:$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/$WAYLAND_DISPLAY \
    -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
    -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
    --privileged steam:trixie

(The --privileged part is only temporary until I found out which capabilities are actually needed. Please don't run your containers with --privileged.)

I get the GUI dialogs to download Steam just fine, so at least some display forwarding is working:

The installation works fine, but when starting Steam it seems like it's not able to find Vulkan devices and then doesn't open any Steam window. (The container is not stopping and I'm seeing repeated ./steamwebhelper output after this.)

[...]
Running query: 1 - GpuTopology
CVulkanTopology: failed create vulkan instance: -9
CVulkanTopology: failed to create vulkan instanceFailed to query vulkan gpu topology

Failed to query vulkan gpu topology
Response: 
Exit code: -2
[...]
Vulkan missing requested extension 'VK_KHR_surface'.
Vulkan missing requested extension 'VK_KHR_xlib_surface'.
BInit - Unable to initialize Vulkan!
[...]

However, Vulkan is clearly working fine in the container, as this commands displays the cube rendering just fine:

$ sudo docker exec -it steam vkcube
Selected WSI platform: xcb
Selected GPU 0: AMD Radeon RX 550 / 550 Series (RADV POLARIS12), type: DiscreteGpu

(I've also tried it on another (pure) Debian machine with a 2080Ti, but I've got the same issue.)

I've created other GUI containers in the past (Firefox for example) and didn't have these problems.

Does anybody have an idea and can point me in the right direction?

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[โ€“] liinux@pawb.social 4 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

I know this not answer your questions, but I was like this years ago, I wanted everything open source, everything in VM or container with minimum permissions, only open source drivers, only flatpak, and all that stuff. I was like that for 3 or 4 years, in the meantime I changed my email address to a provider with better reputation than Google, I stop using everything that was proprietary, stop using Google services. Even did the most stupid thing, deleting my 5 years old Steam account because "I don't need Steam to play, I can pirate games or play open source games so Valve or the companies can't access my data"

And what happened then? While I was happy owning my stuff, I don't have that much things to do on my system, can I play? Yeah, an pirated game through Bottles (since is sandboxes and pirated) but was a pain in the ass, the 50% of the games required at least 2 days setting up Wine to make them work, and I'm not an Linux expert but I know my way around. And by the way, at the moment I was using NVIDIA, and their open source graphics at the moment were shit, not sure how they are now, but you can't literally run Terraria, no joking.

And now that I mentioned NVIDIA open source drivers, at least at the moment you can't even play a video on Firefox because of the stuttering, I can't even try Hyprland or Sway, and even Plasma ran so bad, was so fucking laggy on both Xorg and Wayland.

Oh and the most cancerigneous thing: I distrohopped like 1 time a day searching for the distro with the most compatibility. How many time I wasted on this.

So I suggest you: Don't do that. Don't be me. Want to play? Why don't you set up a dual boot and let Steam only in the secondary OS that you don't want to use? If you want be sure that Steam can't access your other OS, you can encrypt the whole disk or partition. I can tell you, for sure, that videogames are pretty delicate and when you try to run something over different layers, something usually can break and you don't know why.

[โ€“] Lemmchen@feddit.org 4 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Thanks for the input, but I will probably never not want to use Steam and I've accepted non-free firmware blobs a long time ago. All I want is to use a simple sandbox like I use for many other applications (mostly as Docker containers).